Celebrating the opening of Passage: The Art of Atong Atem, the first major solo exhibition of the artist’s work in Australia, Atem oins award-winning writer and filmmaker Santilla Chingaipe for an inspiring conversation exploring Atem’s vibrant photography, showing how the acclaimed artist weaves South Sudanese Dinka Bor culture, community, and bold self-portraiture.
Join us for an inspiring conversation that explores Atong Atem’s vibrant photography, showing how the acclaimed artist weaves South Sudanese Dinka Bor culture, community, and bold self-portraiture.
This event launches the publication Passage: The Art of Atong Atem, a fully illustrated monograph produced by NGV in partnership with Thames & Hudson Australia, published to accompany the exhibition. .
When booking your ticket, you can pre-purchase your copy of Passage: The Art of Atong Atem to have it pre-signed by the artist to collect on the day.
Atong Atem is an Ethiopian-born, South Sudanese artist living in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been exhibited widely across Australia, including at the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Portrait Gallery and the Immigration Museum. Internationally her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern (London) Wereldmuseum (Rotterdam), Fotografiska Shanghai, Stadtgalerie (Germany), Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the National Maritime Museum (Amsterdam) (Het Scheepvaartmuseum). In 2025, Atem exhibited at the Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France in partnership with PHOTO Australia, where she was selected as one of six nominees for the Prix de La Photo Madame Figaro-Arles. She was the recipient of the inaugural La Prairie Art Award from the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2022 and the National Gallery of Victoria and MECCA M-Power scholarship in 2017. Atong has developed numerous collaborations with the fashion world including Romance was Born, Social Studio and Harper’s Bazaar. Her work is held in public and private collections across Australia and the world.
Santilla Chingaipe is a filmmaker, historian and writer. Her multidisciplinary practice, rooted in scholarship and spanning moving image, history and the literary arts, interrogates mobility, memory, erasure and identity. Chingaipe’s first book of non-fiction, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia, was first published in Australia in 2024. Among its many honours, the book was shortlisted for The Stella Prize and longlisted for the Cundill History Prize. It inspired her ground-breaking, multi-award-winning documentary Our African Roots (2021), which examined Australia’s forgotten Black African history and marked the first time an African-Australian interrogated the nation’s colonial history on television. She is a contributor to The Saturday Paper and a columnist for The Monthly, and hosts two monthly cultural events: the literary series First Chapter and its sister event, No Skips: A Listening Party. Because she loves reading. And dancing.
Passage: The Art of Atong Atem is the first monograph on Melbourne-based South Sudanese Australian artist Atong Atem, spanning her earliest works to recent series. Through richly staged portrait photography, Atem uses her own body to explore inherited memory, identity and the legacies of displacement, war and colonialism. Drawing on African studio traditions, feminist aesthetics and diasporic narratives, her work reclaims photography as a site of agency and self-representation.
This co-edition includes texts by Clothilde Morette (MEP), Osei Bonsu (Tate Modern), Natasha Bullock and Anna Honan (NGV), alongside reflections from the artist’s parents, offering layered insight into Atem’s contemporary practice.
Passage: The Art of Atong Atem is the first major solo exhibition of Melbourne-based, South Sudanese artist Atong Atem in Australia. Presenting new and existing photographic works by a leading artist in her generation of contemporary photography. Her art tells a story of a culture that persists amid displacement, war and colonialism. She traces a transcontinental and intergenerational journey, echoing the often-coerced movements of people – telling a story of resilience that endures.
Noting the neglect of East African contributions in mainstream art history, Atem centres her community and herself in her work, honouring Dinka Bor myths and culture. Photography, historically a colonial instrument, becomes a tool for reclaiming identity and agency. Through this lens, Atem explores how identity is performed both in daily life and before the camera, creating spaces where history, memory, and imagination intertwine.